My brother managed to stumble across a joke that went something like this:

How do you know if someone has an iPad?
Because they'll tell you.

Oh yeah, I got an iPad 2 for Christmas :D

Unlike all the spoiled kids tweeting that they got a car from mom/dad instead of an iPhone/iPad, I bought the iPad as a Christmas present for myself which surprised me a little when I got the idea because I don't often buy flashy or expensive things like this. I mean, the last purchase I made (which I still think is very cool) is a mandoline. It slices vegetables very thinly. That's all it does.

I've also mentioned a few times that as a computer programmer, ie: one you'd expect to be enamoured and surrounded with cool electronic stuff, I'm still very much behind the tech curve when it comes to owning said stuff. I'm waaay behind the late majority and laggards, and so late that I'm practically pregnant.

"Food baby? No, that's just some tech from 5 years ago accumulating in my belly."

Also, the last time I spent such a large amount of money in one go I got a call from the bank to confirm that yes it was me that spent that money and no please don't block the transaction because otherwise my friends won't have a holiday house to spend New Year's in.

I'm pretty alien to big purchases and have managed to give my bank absolutely no reasons to increase my credit limit. So when I went to the store and the price of the purchase was repeated back to me by the nice young lady behind the counter, I very slowly forked over my credit card, all the while holding a face that I imagine looked like something you'd get if you crossed pain with a nervous smile.

I bought it on December 5, gave it straight to my mum to wrap and put under the family Christmas tree, and didn't open it until December 25. It was a very long 20 days.

My 'spending money' face

For my first ever Apple device, I'm very impressed. I've never really been an Apple fanboy, although I often find myself defending the company against my mainly Windows/Unix/Android group of developer/tech friends simply because nobody else will. What fun is an argument if everybody is on the same side?

(It usually goes that they pick on Apple for some thing they've done, like the comparison between Apple's walled-garden of an App Store vs the openness of the Android Marketplace: my friends will often attack it for being so developer unfriendly and I'd play devil's advocate, saying something like how Apple is ready to throw its developers under the bus for the benefit and safety of its customers. As a customer, this makes me feel a lot safer when perusing the app store; as a developer, I probably wouldn't want to develop an iOS app any time soon.)

Using the iPad has been a dream with pretty much no hiccups or complaints to speak of. As a customer, this makes me feel supremely satisfied; as a developer, this makes me ask why so many of the technologies I use at work and at home aren't this easy to use? I'm routinely surrounded by examples of difficult to use/understand software/websites/devices that it makes me wonder if we developers did this to ourselves on purpose.

It doesn't have to be this difficult! I'd find myself thinking as I wrestle with another annoying system I have to use as part of my work.

I think it all started with that user interfaces course I took at university where we were taught to focus on the user, test interfaces with actual users, find out what users actually need and other general things to think about so as not to annoy your users. (Pretty much everything that this guy talks about.) Ever since then I've been very user-centric and trying to include that in my own work and to have it show that I do in-fact care about the person who has to use whatever I'm developing.

An offshoot of this is that I really believe that every computer-related frustration a person has ever had is avoidable and a reflection of something missed during development.

It doesn't have to be this difficult! I would often think or say when debating user interface design in my head or with a co-worker.

Now I find myself wondering: Why can't everything be as easy as the stuff my iPad?

I've never been an Apple fanboy, but now I've had a taste of things on this side of the fence and it's pretty sweet over here. In this post-Steve Jobs Apple world, I really hope their user focus continues for years to come, because I am sooo very tired of wrestling with computers to make them do what I want. (I'm looking at you Linux...)

Update: As requested, I've added 1440x900 versions. I really shouldn't have forgotten about that resolution - it's what my work laptop runs at.

---
I got a new 16:10 widescreen monitor over the weekend, and wow at all the extra pixels! :D

I used to have a 17" LCD monitor that dates back to early 2005 and stuck with through all these years and other computer upgrades, until just a few days ago. The thing came with 1 stuck pixel which was easy enough to ignore since it was on the side, and in the last year it had been showing signs of aging. I mean, LCD technology isn't supposed to suffer from burn-in right? Well, this monitor started to, and thankfully a temporary version of it. To see it in action I just had to leave a maximized Firefox window open for too long, and bam! My bookmarks toolbar is now a part of the screen when I close Firefox. (The burn-in would go away after a few minutes of displaying something, anything, else.)

So at 1680x1050, the extra screen real estate is great when working with pretty much any software, particularly the creative stuff: Adobe Audition for sound editing, Adobe Premiere for video editing, Corel PaintShop Photo Pro for image editing, etc. Hell, even using my programming IDE, Eclipse, is better now that I can put those extra views/panels to the side of the code instead of obscuring it.

The only annoyance is that all those wallpapers I'd collected over the years, made for the 1280x1024 resolution, suck at 1680x1050. So once I was done admiring how games and other programs looked on the new monitor, I went through my wallpaper collection and did a massive cull - either going back to the original artist hoping for a widescreen version, or just deleting them.

My own space wallpapers (from 2005-2008... I really need to get back into those), looked pretty bad too, so I took some time to update them for my new screen. Here's what I've managed to do so far:

A Tear in the Night Sky (1440x900, 1680x1050, 1920x1200)

From the Ashes (1440x900, 1680x1050, 1920x1200)

In the Embers of Dying Stars (1440x900, 1680x1050, 1920x1200)

Apart from including extra elements from the original images to make use of the extra width, I've also done away with prominent titles or other obtrusive screen elements (eg: the HUD-like parts that were present in older versions of the last one). The title has now been relegated to the lower-right corner along with my name and website (it used to show my e-mail address, which has changed since these wallpapers first came out).

I'll have to update the actual pages in the Artwork section, and may have to update the originals as well. Hmm... I think I'll just work on getting more up-to-date 16:10 versions of these wallpapers first. Just the ones I like the best anyway - some of them have since fallen out of favour with me.

In my last blog post I mentioned the piano shopping I was doing during my annual leave that, unfortunately for me, will have ended by the time you read this. Back to work on Monday like everybody else... *sigh*

From the major music stores in the city, I was able to quickly cut it down to 2 digital pianos that, for my price range, had pretty much everything I was after: a full range of keys, weighted, with a good grand piano sound, and some options for a sort-of beginner piano player like myself. If you're interested in model numbers, they were the Yamaha Arius YDP-S31, and the Korg LP-350

The Yamaha grand piano sound is what I grew up on, and because of that the Yamaha had a head-start over every other keyboard I came across. The weighted keys though felt a bit tough and kinda bouncy, which weirded me out.

The Korg was the opposite: great feel, but the sound from the built-in speakers felt like they missed the grand piano sound in some notes, particularly the higher ones.

So I spent a lot of time going back-and-forth between the 2 music stores that had these models, and soon enough the staff there were able to recognize me by sight. I brought my headphones to each store, tried to remember the way the pianos felt and sounded as I went between one store to the other, trawled the internet for reviews and opinions from others, and generally spent a crapload of time getting nowhere.

Then, last Sunday, I went indoor rock climbing for a friend's birthday which turned my arms into jelly. It was the best thing to happen to me in my hunt for a digital piano.

With my arms now useless, struggling to lift a glass of coke to my lips in the lunch that followed (well it wasn't that bad, but avid readers of this blog will have learned that hyperbole is my friend), it made a difference when I next went to play those 2 pianos. First, I went to the Yamaha, and the tougher resistance in the keys made it an effort to play. I actually got tired on that piano and thought, Screw this. I'm going home.

The path home from there went passed the other music store with the Korg, so I decided to give the Korg a play anyway, thinking I wouldn't get a whole song finished before my fatigued arms would fail me and droop to my sides in defeat. I sat before the Korg, played and... made it all the way through the song. Huh, I thought, let's try another. So I did, and I got through that too.

I never noticed how much I was struggling with the Yamaha's keys until I had virtually no energy left. I don't know whether that speaks volumes about my lack of upper-body strength or that my purchase decisions tend towards the things that need the least energy out of me, but that was the tie-breaker: I went with the Korg.

I bought it on Tuesday, then waited for the delivery of it every night since then (the colour of the model I was after had to be sourced from another store, but they said they should be able to get it overnight). Like a child on the night of Christmas Eve, I couldn't go to sleep because I kept anticipating the delivery of the piano the next day. In the day that followed, no call from the music store. So I waited the next day, lacked sleep once again, and it still didn't come. This went on for a while - while enough for me to lose sleep over several days in a row such that this morning, even after the full 8 hours of sleep that I normally need to function, I woke up feeling exhausted.

After getting some breakfast in me to provide the energy I needed that sleep wouldn't provide, I got a call from the music store that they would be around with the piano in the next half an hour :D

I was very glad that I could get it before I had to go back to work on the Monday. I even went so far as to record me playing (badly) on it:

So, 2 weeks of leave, and this is what I have to show for it.

I got a webcam the other day - the Logitech Webcam Pro 9000! Now I can more-proudly consider myself a citizen of the digital age and join things that everyday technology-enabled people are a part of, like Skype!

I've been having a bit of fun with the webcam actually - taking photos, testing the face-tracking capability (I can happily report that Logitech webcams are not racist) and making a video or 2 - and I guess like most people out there, I'm really enjoying having this new piece of technology in my life.

"What are you doing, Dave?"

Much like when I got myself a new cellphone, particularly one with a camera that, unlike my last phone, takes pictures at sizes measured in megapixels, I think I might enjoy the video capabilities that are now at my disposal.

When I got my new cellphone, I picked it because of: a) the flip-top design, and b) having a camera that doesn't suck. I had the latter in my purchasing decision because I wanted to take photos that I could upload and use on my blog. Lo and behold, I've been using many of my own photos in my blog instead of trawling the internet for something that resembles the image I'm trying to portray. I've even used the cellphone camera to take pictures of inane things, like Windows XP error messages on supermarket monitors, or billboards I come across in my walks around the city.

So far I've only called my family on Skype with the webcam enabled. They don't have a webcam themselves, so while I couldn't see them, they were able to report that the video and sound feed of me weren't too bad, even when Skype was reporting to them that their internet connection was "slow".

I've started adding a few others who I know have Skype, but there's one overseas friend in particular with whom I can't wait to tell them that I'm not such a useless IT guy anymore :)

Maybe next I can start uploading to YouTube... lol, let's not get carried away here.

(queue obligatory Christmas blog post)

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYBODY!

I planned to write more, but the days have been packed with lots of Christmas and New Year's stuff that kept distracting me from my blog. I should have a bunch of new material, especially now that I've got a phone that takes decent pics that I can transfer to my computer without having to pay cellphone data usage to e-mail it to myself at a resolution so low that it doesn't get measured in megapixels...

I've had a very good year, and I hope the same can be said of y'all. I'll share more of my Christmas and my 2009 once the holiday season has calmed-down some.

Merry Christmas from the cuddly toys living under my family's tree (pic taken with my new phone!)

The Beatles: Rock Band came out earlier this week, which should mean that in the lead-up to the release date I'd be very excited (I was) and that after bringing it home and giving it a go I'd be enjoying the game thoroughly (I'm not).

"I'm not" I say? Does the game suck? Well, I don't know yet.

On the morning of the release of The Beatles: Rock Band (a work day, unfortunately), I got the usual message from the mail room that a package had arrived for me to pick up. Ooooo, exciting! I was thinking, because I knew exactly what waiting for me.

The remainder of the work day was not ordinary, but rather uneventful: picked-up the package, went to lunch w/ dad (although I didn't have to pay for his meal this time), browsed the CD store with him to check out the release of the digitally remastered Beatles albums, worked until all enthusiasm was drained from me, read the local rag on the train ride home, ate dinner, watched CSI: New York on TV...

...and THEN, it was time to play The Beatles: Rock Band with the family.

We were all pretty excited. For me, because it's a new toy; for my brother, probably the same reason; for my parents, because they finally get to play to songs that they grew up with (a change to having to play Boston in Rock Band 2 over and over again - don't get me wrong, I looove Boston, but repetition does remove the mirror sheen on even the nicest things).

So we plugged-in/turned-on all the controllers, loaded-up the disc, and... wait, what's up with my controller? The Xbox guide button on my fake plastic guitar just kept flashing; couldn't register as a controller with the Xbox. Oh F***!!!

I kept the expletive thoughts to my inner voice, conceded my position as 'lead guitar' and let the family play on without me. I went back to my room and sulked by browsing the internet for the guitar tablature to emotion-infused meaningful songs I know so I could learn to play them then and there on my real guitar :(

NOT my favourite peripheral right now...

I've had this problem before (this is actually the 3rd fake plastic guitar I've gone through: the first one having a broken strum bar and the second one having this same flashing light issue) and the guitar is still under warranty, but it means having to send the damn thing back and waiting anywhere from a week to a month for a replacement... again (stupid courier costs associated with returning items when buying from an internet vendor).

Not that I'd want to: I'd rather head for the nearest store, buy a new WIRELESS guitar, and pray the thing doesn't get a bung strum bar. And if it does, at least I'll have the option of going down to the store and venting my frustrations out on the nearest store employee who will likely be some unsuspecting teenager who has absolutely nothing to do with the failings and design faults of my fake plastic guitar.

*sigh*

As you can imagine, I'm not very happy right now. Here I am, blogging about another situation that is out of my control. So, this lunch time, I'm gonna go fill my stomach with tasty fast-food, knowing full well that what I'm putting into me isn't very good for my body and that my patronage is lining the pockets of already-rich corporate billionaires overseas.

At least I still have control over that.

I've left today's blog a bit too late to write something approaching the average number of paragraphs I've had for every other entry thus far of Blog Every Day April, but I was held-up for good reason. That reason: Rock Band 2.

w00t

So I'm gonna leave it at: I just got Rock Band 2, and OMG it's awesome :D (proper blog coming post tomorrow)

One thing I foolishly thought that I'd have more of when I moved into my own place, was time. Oh how wrong I was.

When I was younger, I had this habit of finding waaay too many hobbies and messing around with waaay too many different things. Maybe it's just the thing to do during those teenage years; experimenting to find out who the heck you are and who the heck you want to be. Only a handful of hobbies from that era have survived - drawing and playing the piano (whereas digital art, writing, playing the guitar, and computer programming could be considered post-high-school pursuits) - and yet I haven't yet found the time to improve on a single one.
OK, so it doesn't help that when I moved-in, I went and bought an Xbox 360 and Halo 3, and since then Devil May Cry 4 and I've borrowed Gears of War from a workmate. Now I'm contemplating Guitar Hero 3, although the smarter part of me is telling me to curb the spending.

Despite the new distraction/s, I've found that most of my time is getting lost to cooking. Yes, cooking.

Slightly motivated by a story I heard of a family friend who moved back home because they missed the real homemade stuff their mother made, I've been stocking my fridge and cabinets with raw ingredients and making genuine attempts to recreate the meals that I grew-up with and then some. The good thing is I've found I'm not a total failure when it comes to cooking, and have even had a friend who lives nearby over several times to eat the leftovers. The bad thing however is that there are always leftovers because I'm not yet used to cooking for just myself, and so always end-up with this elaborate meal for a family of 4.

Food aside, there is one hobby I've managed to progress, but only because I've hit a bit of a lull at work: the RSS feed for the Writing section is now done (unlike the other feeds, I couldn't fit entire stories into the feed because they all rely on special formatting which you can only get by visiting the page), hurrah.

I wasn't really going to write anything about this, but then I got an e-mail from someone wondering if my RSS feed was broken because I hadn't reported on it. So what happened to me? I moved into my own place in the city, and celebrated my birthday with friends (in that order too).

Over the past couple of months I'd been looking at places to live in the city as pretty much everything going-on with me right now is there: work, friends, your mum, etc. I used to live out in the suburbs and rely on the trains to take me between these places. I remember when my train buddy (a friend of mine who by sheer coincidence ended-up taking most of the same trains I did for all of our years at university) started talking about how much she hated the trains. After having taken the train for more years than I have fingers, she just got fed-up with them. I didn't understand her then, and soon afterwards she and her husband-to-be moved to Australia.

Earlier this year, I think I finally understood where she was coming from.

Somewhere between the beginning of this year and the date of this post, I got tired of having my life revolve around the public transport system's schedule. Running after trains, waiting at the station, leaving parties early just so I could catch the last train home... small frustrations that just started adding-up. I thought it was about time to do something about it, and so here I am, recently-relocated into an apartment in the city, when I had my birthday.

So my birthday isn't usually something I post about, but it has been a long time since I actually celebrated one of mine with friends. This year's one was a simple affair; dinner at my favourite Italian tratorria (a place I had been going to for every one of my birthdays since turning 21), talking about matters close to our hearts: AIDS monkeys, ginger kids, your mum, etc. I got presents too!

The most notable would have to be the flying alarm clock. And yes, it works as well as the web page suggests: the clock does have a loud shrieking alarm, it does have a propeller that flies off to some dark corner of your room, and it does require you to retrieve the propeller and return it to the clock otherwise THE DAMN THING DOESN'T SHUT UP!

I haven't been late to work ever since.
I've also been a lot grumpier than normal.
Go figure.

And on the back of the last post, I have extended the RSS capabilities to the artwork page as well. Not only that, but I've incorporated Media RSS into so that it can be used with flashy apps like the Firefox plugin CoolIris.

With CoolIris, you can now browse my gallery in sweet 3D:

Pretty eh?

And now, for the writing section.

Just when I thought I was getting too old for presents, I bought a new scanner and suddenly it feels like Christmas has come early! :D OK, so technically it's not a present as I bought and chose it myself, for myself, but the result is the same: I have a new scanner!

If you must know the exact model, it's a Canon CanoScan LiDE 600F. It's a huge step up from the old one, which was also a Canon, but was a relic from the pre-Internet era: a parallel port scanner. Actually, I'd probably still be using that old scanner if it wasn't for the fact that I no longer have access to a computer with a parallel port, and that it doesn't play well with a USB-to-parallel adapter.

So what made me buy it? Well, I've been drawing again in an effort to re-train myself for a big drawing project I'm aiming to do, and I had just finished a sketch that I was relatively proud of. My first thoughts were along the lines of "Ooo, gotta scan and store this one", which after some more thinking soon became "Crap, I can't use the scanner anymore".

Always amazing what necessity makes us do :)

So I went on a bit of a scanning spree and scanned several drawings new and old.

Not my best work, but... new scanner!

As a belated Christmas present, my brother got me Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, Game Of The Year Edition, which includes both the original game (The Longest Journey) and the more recent sequel Dreamfall, as well as the soundtrack to Dreamfall.

I've never owned a point-and-click adventure game before, so this was rather new for me. That's probably one of the reasons it's so fun; the original game may be technically outdated (1999, 640x480 screen res), but most of the themes and the story still hold-up pretty well: saving the world, meeting a magical race, killing the evil witch, all clichés that I've never had the time to completely appreciate, until now.

I'm now onto Dreamfall, and the more modern game is a welcome sequel and step-up from it's predecessor. However, I can't seem to get passed how stiff the character models are during some of the talking scenes. I mean, for an Xbox 360 and PC game released in 2006, I was kinda hoping for more natural movements. Didn't all those developers get that right after the Half-Life 2 / Doom 3 era?

Oh well, just a small blemish in an otherwise enjoyable adventure thus far.

First of all, shouts to my friends who notched-up this milestone in my website stats:

And they've told me that my site works just fine in the PS3 browser :)

Anyway, apologies for the lack of updates, but I've been kinda busy lately. I recently got a new computer, and have spent the better part of a fortnight getting it up to speed. It isn't helped by the fact that I've now got a dual-boot setup, with Windows XP and openSUSE 10.2 (a form of Linux for those who don't know), so I've been getting 2 operating systems back up to speed. The main reason for adding a bit of Linux to my setup, is so that I can develop Red Horizon for Linux-based OS's as well.

I've also spent a bit of time making my Windows XP look a lot like Vista. Things I've read and heard have turned me away from Microsoft's latest Windows offering, so I'll hold-off moving to Vista for a while (that, and many of my development tools don't work in Vista either). But after having been stuck with the blue XP look for so long, I thought it was about time to revitalize what my eyes have been accustomed to. Here's a screenshot showing-off the new look. If I were to select an appropriate simile: it's like adding speed-flames to your operating system.

It was a bit easier to pull-off a whole new look in openSUSE, just by using Beryl, which gives me an OpenGL-accelerated desktop, and a whole lot of cool animations to make my windows fade, beam-up, burn-up, alter transparency, etc. One of the more stand-out features of Beryl is the ability to represent multiple desktops as 4 sides of a rotatable 3D cube. Functional? Time will tell. Hella cool? Oh yes.